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John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

This post is sponsored by Samsung Business. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

When you look at healthcare security on the whole, I think everyone would agree that healthcare has a lot of work to do. Just taking into account the top 5 health data breaches in 2015, approximately 30-35% of people in the US have had their health data breached. I’m afraid that in 2016 these numbers are likely going to get worse. Let me explain why I think this is the case.

First, meaningful use required healthcare organizations to do a HIPAA risk assessment. While many organizations didn’t really do a high quality HIPAA risk assessment, it still motivated a number of organizations to do something about privacy and security. Even if it wasn’t the step forward many would like, it was still a step forward.

Now that meaningful use is being replaced, what other incentive are doctors going to have to take a serious look at privacy and security? If 1/3 of patients having their records breached in 2015 isn’t motivating enough, what’s going to change in 2016?

Second, hackers are realizing the value of health data and the ease with which they can breach health data systems. Plus, with so many organizations going online with their EHR software and other healthcare IT software, these are all new targets for hackers to attack.

Third, while every doctor in healthcare had a mobile device, not that many of them accessed their EHR on their mobile device since many EHR vendors didn’t support mobile devices very well. Over the next few years we’ll see EHR vendors finally produce high quality, native mobile apps that access EHR software. Once they do, not only will doctors be accessing patient data on their mobile device, but so will nurses, lab staff, HIM, etc. While all of this mobility is great, it creates a whole new set of vulnerabilities that can be exploited if not secured properly.

I’m not sure what we can do to make organizations care about privacy and security. Although, once a breach happens they start to care. We’re also not going to be able to stem the tide of hackers being interested in stealing health data. However, we can do something about securing the plethora of mobile devices in healthcare. In fact, it’s a travesty when we don’t since mobile device security has become so much easier.

I remember in the early days of smartphones, there weren’t very many great enterprise tools to secure your smartphones. These days there are a ton of great options and many of them come natively from the vendor who provides you the phone. Many are even integrated into the phone’s hardware as well as software. A good example of this is the mobile security platform, Samsung KNOX™. Take a look at some of its features:

Separate Work and Personal Data (Great for BYOD)

Multi-layered Hardware and Software Security

Easy Mobile Device Management Integration

Enterprise Grade Security and Encryption

It wasn’t that long ago that we had to kludge together multiple solutions to achieve all of these things. Now they come in one nice, easy to implement package. The excuses of why we don’t secure mobile devices in healthcare should disappear. If a breach occurs in your organization because a mobile device wasn’t secure, I assure you that those excuses will feel pretty hollow.

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